http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/374037_amy08.html
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080806_threats_lies_and_audiotape/
By AMY GOODMAN
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
August 7, 2008
It was like an action movie. A young man held at night in a hotel,
threatened with prison. He is to be shipped off to war in the
morning. His friends desperately trying to find him. The "down"
button on the elevator had been disabled. He considered jumping from
the window. When his friends arrive, they encounter military
personnel patrolling the grounds. One sneaks in, gets his friend out,
and they drive off into the night. This was real life for 17-year-old
Eric Martinez, a student at Aldine High School in a poor neighborhood
of Houston. He responded to an Army recruitment pitch, called the
Delayed Enlistment Program.
But then, as 17-year-olds are wont to do, Eric changed his mind. When
the recruiter came to his house and threatened his mother, she went
to the recruiting station to meet with the officer in charge: "She
talked to Sgt. Marquette and told him that I didn't want to go, and
that's it. And Marquette said that I had to go, and if I didn't, that
I'd have a warrant for my arrest, and I wouldn't be able to get no
government loans or nothing like that. So, my mom doesn't really know
anything about it, so she believed it, and she told me. And I
believed it, too, because I didn't know much about it either." It was
then that they took Eric to the hotel.
Martinez's friend, Irving Gonzalez, knew he was next. He had signed
up for the same program. As the oldest of four children of a single
mother, Irving's impulse was to help his family survive, get the
signing bonus and gain access to a college education. He then wanted
to get out of the program, to pursue college directly. He called the
recruiter, Sgt. Glenn Marquette. Desperate, he had the call recorded.
Sgt. Marquette: "This is what will happen. You want to go to school?
You will not get no loans, because all college loans are federal and
government loans. So you'll be black-marked from that. As soon as you
get pulled over for a speeding ticket or anything with the law,
they're gonna see that you're a deserter. Then they're going to
apprehend you, take you to jail ... you will do your time, as you
deserve. All that lovey-dovey 'I want to go to college' and all this?
Guess what. You just threw it out the window, because you just
screwed your life."
Irving and two others were the ones who sneaked Eric out of the hotel.
After the story broke, Marquette was suspended, and the military says
it is conducting an investigation, but neither Martinez nor Gonzalez
has been contacted. Recent history does not bode well. In 2005, Sgt.
Thomas Kelt, who worked at the same Greenspoint Recruiting Station in
Houston as Marquette, left a phone message for potential recruit
Chris Monarch, saying if he didn't show up at the recruiting station
that afternoon: "We'll have a warrant, OK? So give me a call back."
The story went national. The military conducted a daylong "stand
down" on recruitment to retrain their recruiters. They said they
removed Kelt. In fact, he was promoted to head up a nearby recruiting center.
I asked Douglas Smith, spokesman for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command
in Kentucky, about why Kelt wasn't punished. Smith replied that Kelt
had received a "negative administrative action ... just because
someone has done something wrong doesn't mean that they get the death penalty."
But there's a difference between the death penalty and a promotion.
When I asked Smith what the penalty was, he replied, "I'm not allowed
to tell you."
Smith and the rest of the military may dodge reporters' questions,
but they can be subpoenaed before Congress to testify under oath.
Texas Rep. Ted Poe, a Republican, said: "Our country cannot deceive
its citizens. Since the Army hasn't taken the initiative, now
Congress may have to get involved." Another Texas congressman,
Democrat Gene Greene, whose kids went to Aldine High and whose wife
taught there for years, agrees. With no end in sight in Afghanistan
and Iraq, recruiters must be prevented from using desperate and
aggressive measures to lure our nation's young people the poorest
and most vulnerable into the line of fire.
--
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international
TV/radio news hour.
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